13/9 2006

Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null

So Apple updated the iPods and iTunes a decent bit yesterday.

iTunes got a strange end of the stick indeed, managing to feel both more and less cluttered at the same time.

I am, however, firmly in the camp believing it got a bit uglier and less usable overall.

They added some fanciful new browsing modes as well. People say they can eat tons of memory, and I definitely believe that. I thought it looked nice but kind of meaningless at first, like something I'd play with once and then never use again.

Having played with it a little bit I have two things to say:

1. It still feels like much more eye candy than usefulness, but I think I'll flip through the covers at least once in a while.
2. More importantly, I feel a newfound urge to get album covers for all the songs in my library. iTunes function to automatically download covers from the store worked surprisingly poorly on my library, skipping quite a lot of music which it very clearly stocks. Not quite sure what to do about that, but it seems Apple won't let you get the covers through any other means, so I've started trying utilities which extract the goods from Amazon instead. It works, but I know iTunes is just sitting there, clutching much cleaner covers, gleefully grinning at my efforts.

In related news, I clearly see myself getting a white 30 GB iPod in the future. As certain as it gets, but not as soon as possible. The urge that makes you hand over your credit card to the Apple Store late on a Sunday evening isn't there.

Fortunately, I guess.

As a side effect I just imported a an additional bunch of songs into my library. After all, my portable music space restriction just jumped up by 15 spacious gigabytes.

Now I think I shall doodle a bit in Inkscape. I've drawn a bit on paper since the last comic-like thing I uploaded, but nothing digitally. Mustn't get out of whatever little shape has been acquired ...